Back in the fall of 2008, Tamara Westfall was working seventy-to-eighty-hour weeks at Channel 26. “I didn’t have time for anything, didn’t have a life,” she recalls. “It was miserable.” But one day she sped through her work in order to get out in time to play a street game her friend Dax Tran-Caffee was organizing. The game was called “The Architect and the Urchin,” and it took place in the streets, sidewalks and occasional parking garages of the Near North Side. “I played the game and it just reinvigorated me,” Westfall says. “It was a complete self-awareness reminder that I am a human who, beyond money and professional association, also needs fun… It kind of pulled me out of my shell.”

“The Architect and the Urchin” was the second street game Tran-Caffee had run in Chicago, and the first of his own creation. The previous spring he had organized “Journey to the End of the Night,” a street game originally created by a San Francisco-based collective, the Playtime Antiboredom Society, as part of an alternate reality game called SF0. “Journey” takes place over about five miles of the city, with a different starting point and finish line every time it’s played. Players start out as “runners,” trying to cross the finish line after checking in at each of five checkpoints. Meanwhile, a group of volunteer “chasers” is released to hunt down the runners. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s biggest gainers:

1 Joel Quenneville
You caught a Predator, now pluck a Canuck, will ya? Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): “In a recipe for salsa published recently, one of the ingredients was misstated, due to an error,” said an apology run by a local newspaper. “The correct ingredient is ’2 tsp. of cilantro’ instead of ’2 tsp. of cement.’” This is an example of the kind of miscue you should be alert for in your own life during the coming week, Aries. As long as you pay close attention and spot the tiny booboos as they arise, you won’t end up dipping your chips into a gritty, gravely mess. Read the rest of this entry »

Photo: Sam Feldman

In the architectural renderings, twenty-one high-rises line the south lakefront amid rows of orderly green trees. A newly built pedestrian bridge arcs over the Metra Electric tracks and Lake Shore Drive to connect the shimmering high-rises to the lakefront attractions, which include a new fountain, amphitheater and swimming pool. On the side of each high-rise is visible a symbol that’s slowly sliding from ubiquity to oblivion: the Chicago 2016 logo.

In real life, the scene by the Metra tracks in Bronzeville couldn’t look much different. There’s no fountain, amphitheater or swimming pool, no sleek new bridge to connect the city and the lake; instead of the rows of trees there’s a mostly empty parking lot; and instead of the Olympic Village, there’s a thirty-seven-acre deconstruction site. All that remains of Michael Reese Hospital’s thirty buildings are a few ruined hulks, several as-yet-untouched buildings, and numerous piles of rubble with demolition vehicles posed victoriously overhead. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s biggest gainers:

1 Rahm Emanuel
Oh come, oh come, Emanuel; And ransom captive Chicago. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): “Although obstacles and difficulties frighten ordinary people,” wrote French painter Théodore Géricault, “they are the necessary food of genius. They cause it to mature, and raise it up… All that obstructs the path of genius inspires a state of feverish agitation, upsetting and overturning those obstacles, and producing masterpieces.” I’d like to make this idea one of your guiding principles, Aries. In order for it to serve you well, however, you’ll have to believe that there is a sense in which you do have some genius within you. It’s not necessarily something that will make you rich, famous, popular, or powerful. For example, you may have a genius at washing dogs or giving thoughtful gifts or doing yoga when you’re sad. Whatever your unique brilliance consists of, the challenges just ahead will be highly useful in helping it grow. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not unlike the movie “Sandlot.” Instead of PF Flyers, there are bicycles. Baseball bats are traded in for homemade mallets. And Tecate and Pabst take the place of soda pop. The attitude, the camaraderie, however, is all the same. “Find a decommissioned tennis court,” says veteran player and organizer Keith Evans. “We all show up, throw in, just like pick-up basketball.”

By three o’clock, two bike polo games are in full swing with about ten onlookers hanging around the tennis courts in Garfield Park. About two years ago, with permission from the Park District, Evans and company fixed a wooden border around the base of the tennis-court fencing. The wood acts much the way the walls at hockey rinks do. This year, they acquired wood from the Rebuild Exchange and built a partition dividing the courts in half, allowing for two games at a time. Three players per side ride around on single-speed bikes, yelling, “Coming to ya!” or “Left! Left!” and finally “Goal!” The teams return to their sides and tap mallets with one another in congratulations, the polo version of football or baskteball’s butt-tap. Read the rest of this entry »

This Week’s Biggest Gainers

1 John Paul Stevens
Justice, served. Read the rest of this entry »

By Rob Brezsny

ARIES (March 21-April 19): Photons work hard to get from the heart of the sun to the surface. They can take up to 160,000 years to complete the 400,000+/-mile journey. And yet once Earth-bound photons get topside, they travel the ninety-three-million-mile distance to our planet in just over eight minutes. I foresee a metaphorically similar situation unfolding in your life in the coming weeks. A development that has been a long time in the making will accelerate tremendously in its last phase of ripening. Read the rest of this entry »

Illustration: Sanya Glisic

By Martin Preib

The dead seek the lowest places in Chicago: We find them in basements, laundry rooms, on floors next to couches, sticking out of two parked cars or shrubs next to the sidewalk. It is more than gravity that pulls them down, for in every dead body there is something more willfully downward: the lowest possible place, the head sunken into the chest and turned toward the floor.

No matter the cause—an accident, a murder or, as we cite on the Hospitalization Case Report, natural causes—all bodies express this downwardness when we remove them from the cavern they have created merely by their presence, by their being.

Some cops, like me, circle the periphery of the room before we encounter the body, making small talk with other cops guarding the scene, slowly putting on our gloves, unnecessarily doublechecking that our path is clear, anything to avoid the inevitable bending over the body and touching it, shaking it from this descendance it insists upon and bringing it back into our living world, where it must be pronounced, photographed, identified, prodded, stripped and categorized. Read the rest of this entry »